Green Day’s American Idiot: Conceptual Frames for Understanding News

“Don't want to be an American idiot.

One nation controlled by the media.

Information age of hysteria.

It's calling out to idiot America.”
-- Excerpt from American Idiot by Green Day

Consumers use conceptual frames or opinion schemas to interpret product and political news, despite what media critics suggest (Neuman, Just, & Crigler, 1992). Facts, images, and perceptions typically are organized into opinion schemas that are a means of understanding the images, connections and values that an individual attributes to a subject. According to Neuman, Just and Crigler’s (1992) oft quoted work; five such opinion schemas for interpreting news information have been reported:

1. Economic Frame – “reflects the preoccupation with ‘the bottom line,’ profit and loss, and wider values of the culture of capitalism.” (p. 63)
2. Conflict Frame – stressing of conflict between the parties involved.
3. Powerlessness Frame – interpreting events in terms of submissive and dominant forces.
4. Human Impact Frame – framing of events by focusing on specific people or groups.
5. Morality Frame – reference to G-d, his law, morality and other religious tenets.

At times, the news media do not seem understand how their viewers and readers interpret the news, given that the majority of coverage frames stories by emphasizing conflict between the parties in the news story. The news media frequently report from an angle that implies that the parties or institutions involved in a story are involved in conflict. The conflict perspective may even be created by the medium in an attempt to polarize the parties, such as the possibility of adding more fuel to the fire in race-related issues. Viewers and readers in the study used the conflict frame less than the other conceptual schemas and far less than the media that covered the story (Neuman, Just, & Crigler, 1992).

A person’s opinion schema can be influenced by a fully-developed ideology and serves as a proxy for an realized ideology on some issues. Furthermore, the opinion schemas (i.e., conceptual frames), being networks of organized knowledge and beliefs, affect how people filter, sort, and reorganize information while they construct political meaning. If a reporter or ordinary citizen tends toward employing a particular conceptual frame over another, everything they say or read while they construct political meaning and reality will be influenced by that conceptual frame. For example, if the news item is reported using a conflict frame and is interpreted with a morality frame, then some viewers may see the issue as a holy war. As another example, if the news item is reported from an economic frame and is interpreted from a powerlessness frame, then some viewers may see the issue as capitalism exploiting the masses. Taken to the extreme, the possible alternative views of reality are endless. Hence, it is certainly possible that the news media can influence what think about (i.e., public agenda) but the media far from control us, as the song suggests.

Reference

Neuman, W. R., Just, M.R., & Crigler, A. N. (1992). Common knowledge: news and the construction of political meaning. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.